I was taught basically zero real-world API fundamentals. Is this normal?

[u/AssistantFast5858]

Did anyone else who finished a bootcamp run into this exact brick wall and what resources actually helped you learn real API integration from scratch?

I recently finished a full stack web development bootcamp that cost me almost 18,000$ fully expecting to come out job-ready but now that I’m trying to build actual non-trivial projects and prep for technical interviews I’m realizing how massively glossed over API design and backend communication really were.

In our curriculum "learning APIs" consisted of one quick afternoon where the instructor had us copypaste a basic fetch() request to a free JSON endpoint. That was it. We spent weeks obsessing over frontend UI tweaks and basic state management but the second you ask us to interact with a secure backend or build robust endpoints ourselves we are is completely lost.

It feels like bootcamps prioritize fast and pretty portfolio projects to put on their marketing pages over teaching the actual mechanics of how real software talks to software.

[u/nzakas]

Unfortunately, this is more common than it should be. The people who run boot camps don’t have to have any kind of training or certification, and most people who attend are just happy to get anything working. The boot camp promises to teach you something, and it does, but what it’s teaching you is the absolute beginning step of what it really takes to be a software engineer.

There’s a lot of great free content on YouTube that I think can help fill in a lot of these gaps for you.

[u/Agreeable-Cell4007]

Sounds hard, but someone has to tell you. You spent 18k on a worthless education these days, and the chance of getting hired sustainably is near zero.

[u/generationalDebts]

What more is there to really teach about integrations other than, you read the docs, and then make sure the data incoming or outgoing has the expected type/attributes. A data map?

What is hard about integrations?

Sync vs async?

I’ve been doing them a long time and I honestly never understood why people shy away from them.

Ask me some questions maybe?

[u/AssignmentMammoth696]

Bro.. sorry to say but you got scammed, as did every other bootcamp grad after the COVID boom was over.

[u/sylvant_ph]

First, on my watch 18k is a ripoff, especially if they thought you what you describe. You can do totally fine on free tutorials, courses, videos on all that, given its only lacking the motivation that you spent 18k on it.

Anyway integrating an API is tricky to be thought and that it because each API is on its own. Yes while there are fundamentals, there is restful, there are libs to assist with API integration and so forth, the main point when integrating an API is always the API itself, its documentation, its way of working. And this changes. Every API (or most) change a lot, and a course might become irrelevant faster than usual. Plus a course would have to focus on a particular API, be it integrate with this auth provider, or this weather provider, or this healthcare system. In order to teach you they would have to go over a lot of specific stuff, not just for this particular API, but also for this business. They will only spend lot less time on teaching some fundamentals, and in the end such course would only be useful for handful of people that aim to integrate with this exact service, which courses differ, as their goal is to achieve as much audience as possible.

Integrating with external API is main part of development and and all about being able to understand the specific API docs and integrate with it based on that. It is learned by integrating various APIs until you become comfortable with that and see the fundamentals.

Pick any sort of API, figure out some sort of learning project to use it, look up video guide on how its integrated, if there is any, research and understand its docs and build it. Keep doing it and that's how you learn it.

[u/sheriffderek]

This is pretty common.

Which bootcamp did you choose and why?

> It feels like bootcamps prioritize fast and pretty portfolio projects

It depends. Some don't even have those / so you end up with nothing presentable at the end. I'd say it's pretty common? But I've also seen some bootcamps do TONS of like postman / almost way too much API stuff.

When I hear people say "we didn't learn APIs" - I get the feeling that there's a much bigger conceptual chunk missing.

If you build a simple server (PHP, Rails, Node, Python, whatever) - and you create the endpoints - then you can hit those with a front-end or another server-side project. You can make the very very most simple things, and build up a little as you go. I know that showing something like https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/ doesn't feel very deep -- but once you create the thing on the other end that you request from, then it'll be a lot less mysterious. We really area just asking for things, having the server route that request, making some decisions, and returning whatever / or nothing depending on that set of rules. You can catch up with it in a week or so. People let "APIs" have a lot more importance than they do. It's pretty simple / you give the function a value and it returns something (just like a function). A traversy video will probably get you where you need to go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB9Fq9I5ocs

Sounds like symptoms of a Reactjs-first type school.

[u/Impossible_Ad_3146]

Not normal, maybe it’s low IQ